Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Doctoral Defenses

Navigating systems of leadership in Predominantly White Institutions (PWI’s) in higher education as a Queer Woman of Color can be a challenging and complex process--one that integrates identity, experience, expertise, knowledge, patience, and most importantly the ability to risk while remaining authentic and professional. It is ...

Palmer and Zajonc (2010) have argued that institutions of higher education focus disproportionately on transmitting basic skills to their students at the expense of supporting issues of central importance to the development of emerging adults, including clarifying values and identity and defining individual purpose and meaning. As ...

The existence of a persistent gender gap in literacy achievement, and particularly in writing, is not in dispute: boys trail girls in every assessment at state, national, and international levels. Yet although this basic fact is not in dispute, nearly everything else concerning the gender gap in literacy achievement—its ...

For Latinás in the United States, navigating the spectrum of racial and ethnic identities can be complicated. This same complication has the potential to affect one of the largest groups of Latinás in the nation: Mexican-Americans living in Texas or Tejanos. Through qualitative analyses of interviews and surveys and the use ...

In this dissertation, I explore my role as an administrator in higher education admissions at a major university and as a working mother who faces many real world challenges. The grueling travel demands, lofty enrollment goals, campus and inter-office politics, as well as the weekend and late night hours required, made it ...

This study is a very personal reflection. The purpose of the study is to illuminate how following the calling of my heart led to a deeper passion in my own work whereupon I realized my natural and limitless creative potential. It is a blending of my narrative with research conducted over a ten year time period on midlife ...

Although Catholic schools are the largest sector of the national private and faith-based educational market, the overall student enrollment in Catholic K-12 schools has steadily declined. In order for Catholic schools to remain sustainable and competitive among the many different educational options in the twenty-first century, ...

The objective of this multiple case study was to examine how 3 pairs of high school students from a Northern Vermont High School approached quadratic functions through traditional and multiple representation tasks. Four research questions were examined: 1) How do students think about the quadratic function as they work on a ...

Amidst ever-growing demands for accountability and increased graduation rates to help justify the rising costs of higher education, few topics in undergraduate education elicit a broader range of responses than student evaluations of teaching (SETs). Despite debates over their efficacy, SETs are increasingly used as formative ...

In 2006, the Vermont School Board's Association launched a pilot implementation of Policy Governance® in four Vermont school districts. Policy Governance is a coherent governance model that requires boards to establish policy in four policy quadrants (Carver, 2006). Key features of Policy Governance include the clear delineation ...

This qualitative study focuses on the faculty engaged in the preparation of secondary teachers at North East University (NEU). It seeks to discover how they see themselves as professionals and assess their work preparing future teachers in “Best Practices” of teaching so that they can effectively teach all students, ...

Public education is a cornerstone of our democracy and social advancement. However, current Vermont graduation rates would indicate that public education at the high school level does not address the needs of all twenty-first century learners. Research has revealed that personalization and creating a connected environment are ...

The purpose of this dissertation is to learn how the ecological perspective can describe such a program with the intent of learning how to develop an evaluative tool that utilizes the framework that incorporates development and context. This study describes a state-wide Vermont program, Families Behind Walls that works with ...